BRONSON Strikes!

The Sundance film festival is gearing up its annual whorefest, and some of its lesser known hookers are already getting some play from the johns. Over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells posted a trailer for an independent British film named Bronson. The film stars Tom Hardy as a young man who, at the age of nineteen, decides he wants to make a name for himself. So he saws off the end of a shotgun, attempts to rob a post office, and ends up in prison for the rest of his life due to his notoriety. The trailer's assertion that Bronson is a "Clockwork Orange for the 21st century" comes from the fact that the film attempts to explain the mentality of upcoming generations. As director Nicholas Refn says:

It is Bronson's unending thirst for celebrity that has kept him in prison for so long. And it was this particular aspect of his personality that we tried to capture in this film.

Hopefully Refn and company manage to straddle the line between dark comedy and hideous violence like Kubrick's shifty and insane masterpiece. In Clockwork, Kubrick warned about future generations and their incapacity to feel sympathy or compassion for others. From the trailer, it appears this movie will lock in with Clockwork and explain how celebrity-status drives young people to do ever-crazier feats of violence in order to achieve notoriety. It's a message that's painfully obvious and troubling here in America, where the media controls nearly every aspect of popular culture. For instance, the shootings in Columbine led to many copycat crimes, the perpetrators of which would brag that they would now be famous for what they did. How much longer before we see imitations of even larger acts of terrorism such as 9/11 by ordinary kids who are mesmerized by the immortality such an event would bring them? It's a scary thought in a scary world.